Learn about tables of authorities

A table of authorities lists the references in a legal document, along with the numbers of the pages the references appear on. To create a table of authorities, you mark citations and Microsoft Word inserts a special TA (Table of Authorities Entry) field in your document. You can then search the document for the next long or short citation to mark, or you can automatically mark each subsequent occurrence of the citation. If you don’t want to use the existing categories of citations, such as cases or statutes, you can change or add categories of citations.

When you build a table of authorities, Word searches for the marked citations, organizes them by category, references their page numbers, and displays the table of authorities in the document. For example, the field

Create the table of authorities

Click where you want to insert the table of authorities.

To make sure that the document is paginated correctly, you need to hide field codes and hidden text. If the TA (Table of Authorities Entry) fields are visible, click Show/Hide
in the Paragraph group on the Home tab.

On the References tab, in the Table of Authorities group, click Insert Table of Authorities.

In the Category box, click the category that you want to include in your table of authorities. To include all categories, click All.

Do one of the following:

To use one of the available designs, click a design in the Formats box.

To use a custom table of authorities layout, choose the options that you want.

Tip: To use additional options for customizing a table of authorities, you can use fields. For example, you can build the table of authorities for only part of the document.

Select any other table of authorities options that you want.

Note:

If you add, delete, move, or edit a citation or other text in a document, you should update the table of authorities. For example, if you edit a citation and move it to a different page, you need to make sure that the table of authorities reflects the revised citation and page number. To update the table of authorities, click to the left of it and press F9.

Don’t modify the entries in the finished table of authorities; if you do, your changes will be lost when you update the table of authorities.